Well that's true enough. My main argument is consistency. Cells and code objects together make up closures, so to manipulate closures you need both. Right now I am using a ctypes hack to modify the cells/closures, for what I consider a strategically important use-case. So I guess a type(cell) hack isn't out of place; the risk is it's fragile.

So, to really make hot reloading work with no hacks I need both this and the follow-up of https://bugs.python.org/issue14369 to be implemented. Or equivalently, a python interface to make closures mutable.

Honestly I don't know what your criteria are, so it's hard to make a point.